#donors trust

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rightwinger Leonard Leo helped fuel Bud Light boycott, tax filings show

Exclusive: Documents reveal group linked to Leo gave money to another group that played central role in boycott

Martin Pengelly at The Guardian:

Tax filings obtained by the Guardian show how the rightwing dark money impresario Leonard Leo helped fuel the Bud Light boycott in response to ads featuring the transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, an effort that generated threats against Mulvaney, violence against consumers and layoffs by Anheuser-Busch. Uncovered by the watchdog group Accountable.US, the filings for 2022 show the Concord Fund, a group linked to Leo, gave $350,000 to Consumers Defense, an arm of Consumers’ Research, not long before that group played a central role in the Bud Light boycott. Leo is a Catholic conservative activist widely known as the force behind the Federalist Society, which has helped transform the US courts system, ultimately through the installation of three hardline justices on the supreme court that has handed down epochal rulings on abortion rights, presidential immunity and more.

But Leo’s fundraising work ranges wider. Consumers’ Research was formed in 1929 to champion consumers’ rights, but went largely dormant before being revived as a rightwing watchdog. It now claims to lead “the fight against ESG”, or environmental, social and governance policies, in corporate America. It issues “woke alerts” concerning companies it deems to be “putting progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers”. Links between Leo and Consumers’ Research are known but have not been directly confirmed. In 2021, Marble Freedom Trust, a non-profit controlled by Leo, received a record $1.6bn donation from Barre Seid, a Chicago billionaire.

That year and in 2022, Consumers’ Research enjoyed huge funding boosts when it received nearly $15m from Donors Trust. That group, linked to Leo, calls itself a “principled philanthropic partner for conservative and libertarian donors”. It has also been called the “dark-money ATM of the right”. The New York Times and Bloomberg previously linked Leo to the sudden funding influx to Consumers’ Research. Leo did not comment.

Consumers’ Research is also known to be a client of CRC Advisors, Leo’s for-profit firm. The tax filings obtained by the Guardian show another direct link.

[...] In spring 2023, Anheuser-Busch paid such a price. It began with a video featuring Mulvaney, a trans influencer. “Happy March Madness!!” she wrote. “Just found out this had to do with sports and not just saying it’s a crazy month! In celebration of this sports thing @budlight is giving you the chance to win $15,000! Share a video with #EasyCarryContest for a chance to win!! Good luck! #budlightpartner.” It seemed innocuous, but rightwing anger, primed by culture-wars battles over trans imagery in business and education, fueled calls for a boycott.

The Guardian has a report out that right-wing dark money influencer Leonard Leo helped fuel funding for the Bud Light boycott.

[dragoni]

Did Trump know this when he picked him to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general?

This is why the Koch's paid  Whitaker $1.2 million. 

The New York Times dropped a major story Tuesday evening: “President Trump told the White House counsel in the spring that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute two of his political adversaries: his 2016 challenger, Hillary Clinton, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey.” According to the Times, Donald McGahn II, the counsel, told Trump this would be an abuse of power and that Trump had no authority to launch such prosecutions. McGahn also had White House lawyers draft a memo for Trump warning that such a move could lead to impeachment.

Whitaker was the President of FACT, a nonprofit funded by the Koch’s #DonorsTrust. One of his jobs was to target and smear Hillary Clinton, so that, Trump and Republicans could win in 2016.

During a radio interview that Clinton ought to have been prosecuted. And he raised the prospect of Clinton being charged by a next administration, assuming it was not hers: 

In another interview at that time, Whitaker said Clinton should have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act, and that it was necessary to charge her in order to preserve the rule of law. 

Two months later, appearing on the Fox Business Channel as a pundit, Whitaker indicated he believed that if Trump won, his administration should reboot the Clinton email case.

In a May 2017 radio appearance, Whitaker essentially called for a special counsel to investigate Clinton

How much will Whitaker receive if he fires Mueller or ends the investigation into Trump’s Russia Collusion?

[theecoreport]

Fossil Fuel Industry's Academics For Hire

Fossil Fuel Industry’s Academics For Hire

A Greenpeace investigation of the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Academics For Hire leads to Princeton and Penn State

Originally Published on Energydesk

By  Lawrence Carter and Maeve McClenaghan

A Greenpeace undercover investigation has exposed how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the…

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[sbieda]

Funders behind the $553 Bill climate change denial effort revealed.

http://drexel.edu/now/news-media/releases/archive/2013/December/Climate-Change/

[checksandbalancesinc-blog]

Virginia-based charity Donors Trust has promised anonymity to donors who seek to fund “sensitive or controversial” issues.

News outlets unearth more Donors Trust recipients | The Center for Public Integrity

[cheshirecat-rabbit]

Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, based out of the DC suburb of Alexandria, VA, have sent $118 million to the ‘climate denial machine‘ from 2002-2010, according to a Greenpeace analysis featured in the Guardian. The graph above, from the article, illustrates the significance of this money as compared to giants like Koch and Exxon.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Working out of an nondescript brick rowhouse in suburban Virginia, a little-known organization named Donors Trust, staffed by five employees, has steered hundreds of millions of dollars to the most influential think tanks, foundations, and advocacy groups in the conservative movement. Over the past decade, it has funded the right's assault on labor unions, climate scientists, public schools, economic regulations, and the very premise of activist government. Yet unlike its nearest counterpart on the progressive side, the Tides Foundation, a bogeyman of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, Donors Trust has mostly avoided any real scrutiny. It is the dark-money ATM of the right.

Founded in 1999, Donors Trust (and an affiliated group, Donors Capital Fund) has raised north of $500 million and doled out $400 million to more than 1,000 conservative and libertarian groups, according to Whitney Ball, the group's CEO. Donors Trust allows wealthy contributors who want to donate millions to the most important causes on the right to do so anonymously, essentially scrubbing the identity of those underwriting conservative and libertarian organizations. Wisconsin's 2011 assault on collective bargaining rights? Donors Trust helped fund that. ALEC, the conservative bill mill? Donors Trust supports it. The climate deniers at the Heartland Institute? They get Donors Trust money, too.

Donors Trust is not the source of the money it hands out. Some 200 right-of-center funders who've given at least $10,000 fill the group's coffers. Charities bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, the DeVoses, and the Bradleys, among other conservative benefactors, have given to Donors Trust. And other recipients of Donors Trust money include the Heritage Foundation, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, the NRA's Freedom Action Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, chaired (PDF) by none other than David Koch. 

In a recent interview, Ball, who calls herself a libertarian, went to great lengths to stress that she's no Koch brothers stooge, and that Donors Trust is not yet another appendage of the almighty "Kochtopus." She insists, "We were not created by them at all."

Donors Trust is a so-called "donor-advised fund," a breed apart from a family foundation like, say, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which helped build the conservative movement over decades with donations totaling tens of millions of dollars. The people who donate to Donors Trust don't get final say over how their money is spent. But they get to recommend where their cash goes, and in exchange for giving up some control, they get a bigger tax write-off than they would with a family foundation. (And those who wish it get anonymity.)

Ball says she travels all over the country courting wealthy conservatives and libertarians, and attends Koch donor retreats and Cato "shareholder" meetings. The crux of her pitch is this: Rich folks can give to Donors Trust and rest easy knowing that their millions will continue bankrolling the conservative movement long into the future, even after their death.

Donors Trust grew out of the fear among right-leaning donors that their family foundations might end up in the hands of those who would fund centrist or, even worse, left-of-center causes. At the behest of the late Bruce Jacobs, a Seattle-area businessman and "paleocon" who didn't want to underwrite a local community foundation, Ball and a conservative strategist named Kimberly Dennis created Donors Trust.

Donors Trust is the only honey-pot of its kind for right-leaning donors. But on the left, there's theTides Foundation, which gives out tens of millions of dollars each year to thousands of left-leaning groups in the US and overseas (including Mother Jones' nonprofit arm, the Foundation for National Progress). Tides is a target of conspiracy theorists such as TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who hasfeatured Tides on his infamous connect-the-dots chalkboard. But Donors Trust's strategic intent is far narrower and more coherent than Tides'. The groups funded by Donors Trust more or less pursue the same agenda—eliminate regulations, kneecap unions, shrink government, and transfer more power to the private sector.

Donors Trust keeps its contributors secret. Funders can ask Donor Trust to publicly identify their donations, but very few do, Ball says. The reasons for preferring anonymity are many. Some donors want to avoid attention; others don't want their mailboxes and inboxes filling up with unwanted solicitations for more money.

Tax records, however, reveal some of the sugar-daddies of the conservative and libertarian movement who funnel big money through Donors Trust. The Knowledge and Progress Fund, a charity bankrolled by Charles Koch, gave $2 million in 2010. The DeVos family charity, another pillar of conservative politics, contributed $1 million in 2009 and $1.5 million in 2010. And yet another long-time bankroller of conservative politics, the Bradley family, donated $650,000 through their charity between 2001 and 2010.

h/t: Mother Jones

[monohedron]